Google Project Wing

Trending News: Inside Google's Secret Drone Program

Why Is This Important?

Because before long all packages may be delivered within minutes by drones.

Long Story Short

Google X, the company’s research arm, has been experimenting with delivery drones for two years in Australia for top secret Project Wing and test flights seem to have been successful.

Long Story

Google’s Project Wing has been going on for two years with the mission of creating self-flying drones that can make deliveries at high speed.

A team led by MIT roboticist Nick Roy has run over 30 test flights during August at remote farms in Queensland, Australia with drone planes that are known as "tail sitters." A tail sitter has a wingspan of 4.9 feet and is a cross between a plane and a helicopter, which takes off vertically before rotating to a horizontal position to fly. When it reaches the drop-off point, it hovers and winches the package down to the ground with a tether, attached to an ‘egg’ electronic sensor that detects when the package touches the ground and detaches it.

The planes are pre-programmed with their destination and then go there automatically, unlike many military drones, which are controlled as they fly. The drones are speedy and without traffic to contend with could make deliveries across major cities within minutes.

“We’re starting to see same-day delivery service change the world,” Astro Teller, head of Google’s Moonshots — their name for Google X’s more ambitious projects — said to The Atlantic. “Why would we think that being able to get something in just a minute or two wouldn’t change the world?”

The idea was first developed with disaster relief and a way of delivering defibrillator kits to people suspected of having heart attacks in mind, but it could soon be used for commercial deliveries. In the future this technology could vastly reduce our carbon footprint and Amazon have already started to think along these lines for their deliveries.

This project is another example of Google’s ambitious tech wing that has pioneered self-driving cars and Google Glass and is experimenting with many exciting, top secret robotics ideas.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question: Should we trust drones to make deliveries? Could large numbers of drones in the sky make air travel more dangerous?

Disrupt Your Feed: More than 400 US military drones have crashed in the last 13 years —I’d rather have my deliveries come in a van.

Drop This Fact: The first pilotless aircraft were developed in the mid-1800s when Austrians sent unmanned, bomb-filled balloons to attack Venice. Drones closer to those we see today were first used in the early 1900s as target practice for military personnel.